An investigation of the theme of Transparency in the Canadian Federal Government. Non-partisan: Power corrupts and Absolute Power corrupts absolutely. Our model: the muckracker journalists.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Book Review: The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy

The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy
by David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith (Praeger, Westport,
Connecticut, 2007, 181 pages).

A dangerous book? Green and fascist: are ecology and democracy incompatible?Contains index, footnotes, exceedingly well documented. Part of the Praeger Politics and the Environment series.

The
authors are environmentalists, academics, authors, physician,
scientist, lawyer, philosopher - definitely not people to dismiss -
which renders the book the more dangerous, being signed by such
(apparently) credible witnesses. They are committed environmentalists
with quite a few notches on their guns. The book begins with the
unoffensive dedication:

"This book is dedicated to all who work for a truly equitable and environmentally sustainable world"The
authors then procede to a devastating analysis of "liberalism",
democracy and "liberal democracy" showing how they have aided and
abetted enivronmental crises: climate change, habitat destruction, etc.
Their analysis is cogent and deserves reading and reflection upon.
Unfortunately, the authors then procede into a minefield of semantic
errors and draw some really dangerous conclusions from their faulted
logic:ERRORS:

1-
They conflate "liberalism" with "economic liberalism", ignoring the
antinomian, paradoxical nature of the latter: unfettered freedom to
accumulate leads necessarily to inequality of power / opportunity thus
negating the liberal ideology used to justify economic liberalism.

Liberalism:
attitude, philosophy, or movement that has as its basic concern the
development of personal freedom and social progress.

2-
Critique of Democracy. Representative democracy leads to "temporal
myopia". Politicians pander to the electorate's basest drives in order
to win the next election. In effect, society ends up incapable of
thinking or seeing more than four years ahead. Politicians also must
pander to corporate power both for campaign contributions and to provide
jobs to buy votes. These critiques are, alas, all too true but do they
necessarily apply, to such an extreme degree, to decentralized,
community based, participatory forms of democracy? The authors make the
mistake of painting all forms of "democracy" with the same brush when,
in fact, there may be vital differences which need to be explored and
exploited for socity's benefit.

3- The
authors employ a facile, "common sense", Darwinism-based argument to
justify authoritarian, top-down social regulation: authoritarianism is
genetically programmed. This is virtually undeniable: man is, after all,
a terrestrial vertebrate (mammal) and, at the most primitive level of
social behavior should - obviously! - function like other mammals,
dduuhhh.. See, for example, Stanley Milgram's pioneering research on
"authoritarian compliance":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experimentThe
authors then go on, from this sociobiological truism to argue,
counter-factually, that democracy can't work and that some form of "
idealistic authoritarianism" is needed to save the world from greed and
plunder

The big "elephant in the room"
that these authors ignore is that man is also, almost certainly,
"genetically programmed" for face-to-face, participatory, "tribal
village democracy". Stop to think about it for a second: why, exactly,
did the human capacity for speech arise? Other higher primates don't
have this highly evolved, "genetically programmed" capacity for
communication through speech. Not the gorilla, nor the chimpanze, nor
even the ourang-outang (though they come closest to us in this ability).
Speech communication synergistically co-evolved with face-to-face,
participatory, "tribal village democracy", the oldest, primordial form
of human governance. That is to say, our ancestors were "naturally
selected" to speak - and speak well - because group solidarity and group
co-ordination, which possess "survival value", are facilitated by the
capacity to communicate effectively vocally.

4-
The authors blame liberals for the crimes of the neocons (who intensely
hate liberals!). Thus the politics of fear of the Bush Administration
as well as the abolition of human rights at Guantanamo Bay are laid
squarely at the doorstep of "liberalism, liberals, democracy and liberal
democracy". This is painting with a broad brush indeed! (The authors'
penchant to conflate all these terms together, wily-nily, is itself a
warning that a stretch of faulty logic is ahead. It is reminiscent of
the Right's tendancy to conflate "liberals", "socialists",
"secularists", "humanists", "secular humanists", "atheists",
"communists", etcWhat
I find disturbing about this book is not so much its content or its
argument - who among us has not proven wrong-headed on occasion? - but
the fact that it is published by Praeger in their Politics and the
Environment series: the book is intended to be a serious intellectual
contribution to a serious social issue. I can't really blame Praegar
though: if this is where we have arrived as a society, so be it! It is
the fact that we have actually arrived at this level of intellectual
bankruptcy as a civilization that is chilling.The
authors themselves seem relatively "blameless" too. From my reading,
they arrived at their tragic conclusions out of desperation at the
failure of modern society to halt its headlong rush toward ecological
suicide. They appear, in effect, to be decent men acting from good, not
evil, intent. And THAT really sends chills up my spine..